Context!

Nottingham Castle’s biggest problem has always been the fact that it’s not actually a castle. This is a big problem for a city where so much of the tourism is based around Robin Hood – people expect to see the famous Nottingham castle, when it doesn’t actually exist.

Actually this is only half true. There was a castle in the city – and apparently quite an impressive one – but unfortunately it was burned down in the English Civil War some four hundred years ago. A manor was built on its smouldering remains, but then that had to be rebuilt after a Victorian era mob burned it down as well. As a result, the current ‘castle’ is essentially a manor from the 1800s on top of a hill, surrounded by some of the surviving medieval defences.

Windsor Castle it ain’t. At best, Nottingham Castle is more like an unremarkable city hall. But nonetheless it’s the closest thing the city has to a ‘central’ tourist attraction.

The castle walls and grounds survive – perhaps because they’re a lot harder to burn down – but they set tourists up for disappointment. Once first time visitors make it through the medieval gatehouse, the actual ‘castle’ is normally a big let down.

A few years ago, Nottingham Castle finally announced that they were closing for a long period of renovations. I had a quick look around before it closed in 2018, and yeah, the exhibits looked really tired and outdated. It really needed a refresh.

Now after a longer-than-expected period of closure, Nottingham Castle has reopened in 2021! My friend had never been, so we had a look around to see the NEW and IMPROVED castle experience. Now, having seen where the £30 million in funding was spent… I can say that it’s better, but still far from great.

The Experience

From the second we walked through the gatehouse, and the fancy NEW gift shop, it’s obvious that the funding has really modernised the castle grounds. There’s a new adventure playground, better signage showing what the castle would have looked like if Oliver Cromwell hadn’t ruined everything, and even free deck chairs for visitors to lounge around in. The castle itself, hidden behind trees, is still underwhelming, but short of building an entirely new fake castle there’s only so much they could do.

As we were both history nuts, and my friend wanted to know what actually happened to the castle, we both made a beeline for the main exhibit, and… here’s where the problems started.

The main exhibition is brand new. There’s huge screens with animations showing how the castle was built and how it was destroyed (twice). The animations, done through a sort of paper puppet style, are evocative and do a great job of explaining hundreds of years of history in a few short minutes. There’s displays discussing Nottingham’s history with revolution – related topics like the Luddites, the suffragette movement and even the recent Extinction Rebellion protests are discussed. It reminded me a lot of the People’s museum in Manchester.

All of this is great – it’s much better than the previous exhibition, which hadn’t been updated since the 70s – but it all feels very surface level. There’s very few artefacts on display and it’s hard to learn much about what actually happened. It feels more like an educational experience at a theme park or something.

It feels strange knowing that the Castle must have all the historic artefacts in storage, far away from the public. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that the museum curators have tried to make history more accessible and engaging to the general public, but I didn’t feel like I’d really learned much, if I’m honest.

Upstairs there’s a couple of smaller rooms on Nottingham’s lace industry and medieval history, which are a bit more traditional. They feel fresh, there’s more on display and I learned a lot more than I did in the revolutions display. I don’t want to sound crotchety, but… I think I preferred them?

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The long white art gallery is the only room kept from the old museum layout, although the art has been shifted around into loose categories. Some more contemporary art has been added, and the signage has been updated – one painting of a nude woman discusses sexism in art, for example.

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Beyond that there’s also two rooms for temporary galleries – at time of writing, one has an exhibition on local designer Paul Smith, which is colourful (we took some lovely selfies) but not really interesting unless you’re really into design. The other is a small room about the history of black factory workers in the 1960s, and their struggles for equality in Nottingham.

And… That’s about it, at least in terms of the museum section of the Castle. But what about Robin Hood?

Nottingham’s famous outlaw has his own section… but it’s for kids, and costs extra to get in. As we’re both well into our 20s we decided to pass, but from what I can tell it’s a sort of interactive adventure as opposed to a museum.

There’s also a cave tour, exploring the sandstone tunnels underneath the Castle. These also cost extra and you need to book online for it – we forgot to do this and missed out. If I ever return to see this section I’ll do a follow-up piece as I’ve never seen these caves before.

So how was it?

The Nottingham Castle refurb was hyped up in the local news a lot, especially as the covid pandemic accidentally gave them more time than expected to fix the aging museum up. While obviously there’s not much they can do about the Castle itself being unimpressive, I don’t think there’s enough to justify £13 a ticket, just because there’s so little to actually see once you’re inside.

The old museum layout was tired and hadn’t been updated in decades, but there was at least more on offer. The new exhibits almost feel half done at times – like a preview event where the other half of the museum is still under construction. What’s there is cool, but… there’s just not enough. Nottingham Castle isn’t a museum you can lose yourself in anymore, and I think that’s my biggest disappointment.

I asked my friend what she thought of Nottingham Castle, and she offered this:

“Stunning remodeling, great use of space… More direction needed in terms of signage and perhaps more on the history and of the history of Nottingham. Interesting to see Paul Smith’s work and how they have linked in black history etc with Art“

I should note that she is much smarter than I am, and has studied modules on museum curation – she knows her stuff better than I do!!

RATING: 3 pointy arrows out of 5

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Helpful information

• If you live locally there’s a 10% discount available. If you book online, you need to enter a code they give you. You can combine this with discounted tickets for students etc.
• The cave tour offered by the Castle is separate from the ‘Caves of Nottingham’ attraction! Nottingham is built on sandstone so it just has a lot of caves!
• The castle is on a hill, but there’s step free access, including a new ramp outside.
• There’s disabled but no gender neutral toilets.
• At time of writing you need to book your tickets online. Beware – the booking system is a bit crap. If you want to do everything, you need to book both your tickets and the Robin Hood thing/cave tour (as ‘add-ons’) ahead of time.